Exhibit Shows Evolution Of Treatment

July 11, 1998|By DEBORAH STRASZHEIM Daily Press

WILLIAMSBURG — Stepping into a hallway of The Public Hospital exhibit, visitors hear voices.

Their desperate words are a re-creation of conversations which might have taken place between doctors and patients at the re-created mental hospital. A doctor's key is heard shutting a cell door and closing in a man who yells that he is royalty, then says to himself, "Father in heaven, save me."

The exhibit depicts the evolution of the treatment of mental illness, from when people were chained in cells to when doctors voiced ideas more than 100 years ahead of their times.

One side of the hallway exhibit shows re-created rooms for patients; a 1773 cell with a straw mattress, chains and a barred window; the inside of a patient's room as it would have looked in the 1840s, when treatments were more humane.

Across the hall, the exhibit shows tools used to treat the mentally ill: a straitjacket, a chair with restraints, instruments used to bleed patients of their demons. Placards describe drugs given patients to make them ill and empty them of their fluids.

But the exhibit also shows how mental health care changed, displaying spinning wheels and other items used in the 1840s when the idea was to help patients become social and productive citizens.

The original Public Hospital opened in the fall of 1773, with 24 cells for patients. A little more than 100 years later, in June 1885, the original building and five other buildings at the asylum burned.

In the room with the cells, a quotation from John Minson Galt II, hospital superintendent in the mid 1800s, reads: "To a sensitive person, on visiting an asylum for the insane, feelings of sadness are likely to arise."